


Stopover

by jonesandashes



Category: Andromeda (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 11:47:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2810957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jonesandashes/pseuds/jonesandashes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The negotiations had been an endless queue of great parties, enough double-talk to give you a headache, kidnappings, and so many semi-successful attempts at passive-aggressively poisoning all of them that Beka found herself longing for a good old-fashioned shootout instead. At least those didn’t ruin chocolate torte for everyone forever.</p><p>Set during the early days of the first season.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stopover

**Author's Note:**

  * For [JK Ashavah (ashavah)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashavah/gifts).



Not long after the latest failed pitch to sign Dylan’s new Commonwealth Charter, they stop over on the Miesen Famos drift. Officially it’s for supplies; unofficially, after the last three weeks getting nowhere on the merchant planet Korres, everyone is itching to not be on a ship making diplomatic nice for five minutes. The negotiations had been an endless queue of great parties, enough double-talk to give you a headache, kidnappings, and so many semi-successful attempts at passive-aggressively poisoning all of them that Beka found herself longing for a good old-fashioned shootout instead. At least those didn’t ruin chocolate torte for everyone forever.

Even Dylan ran out of patience by the end, and when he’s really trying his diplomatic reserves run deeper than anyone else Beka knows. (Except maybe Rev Bem, although Beka’s never seen anyone actually reach bedrock there so she doesn’t know how far down it is. Beka is 100% completely okay with never finding out. Presumably you’d eventually wear through the layers of carefully cultivated serenity, then wise sayings, then jokes, then relevant parables, then off-colour vaguely threatening jokes, but once you reach that last one anyone even sort of sane laughs nervously and stops digging.)

Anyway. Korres was a bust that left them right on the edge of Nietzschean space and a little punchy. They leave Rommie and Rev Bem with Andromeda, and everyone else piles onto the Maru to wander around Miesen Famos for a few hours. It’s basically a big, multi-deck market. Lots of junk, lots of food. Great place to find odd jobs if you need a few thrones.

Beka, Harper, Trance and Tyr pause at the entrance, surveying the bustling crowds and breathing in the general atmosphere of self-serving barbarousness. It’s a pit, sure, but everyone here is on the same page about it being a pit. After Korres that counts as refreshing.

“Ahhh, civilization,” Beka sighs, mostly joking.

Tyr immediately disappears, and Harper announces that if anyone wants him he'll be wandering around handing out resumes, and here was a brief list of what he was looking for in a future employer (hazard pay, at least three days between murder attempts, and a beach-themed party of appreciation every year featuring free, unpoisoned drinks, babes, and _absolutely no chocolate torte_ ), and did anyone want to come with him, and that's fine have fun in loserville.

“Oh and while you're there,” Harper says, finally winding down to the finish, “anybody sees anything that might have come off an ES-14, pick it up. I'm building a thing. If you see an actual ES-14 call me immediately so I can move in.” He departs arm in arm with Trance.

Dylan glances at Beka.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “There won’t be any ES-14s on this rock. The 09s maybe but he would never split for an ES-09.”

“But if I see something in the -14 series we have to leave in a hurry?”

“Nah. Or on second thought, yes. I don’t want to be stuck here for the next week, and that’s how long it would take me to drag him away.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” Dylan says, although not as playful as usual. The residual annoyance about Korres remains pretty thinly veiled. “I don’t enjoy the hiring process,” he adds, an obvious lie. Dylan loves plucking up candidates and encouraging their potential through stirring speeches, sage advice, and occasionally heated lectures about reliability. She’s only known him a few months and this is clearly one of his favourite things, right up there with Andromeda and fights he can only probably win. Crew members who call him captain and don’t require occasionally heated lectures about reliability might also be on that list, but she has no idea where they’d be placed because there aren't any around for reference.

They walk through walking through the port deck, mostly ignoring the vendors. It’s all knock-offs and price-gouged crap up here near the entrance; the good stuff - if there was any - will be down deep. Beka’s father used to say never to get out of bed for anything you could buy in under thirty minutes.

Back during the height of the final inglorious Beka Valentine drug addiction relapse tour, she could find a hit in a place like this in less than 15. And Harper still insists he once got in, located her, fished her out, and got back to Maru in the span of one soap opera commercial break. Neither of those things necessarily disproved the rule.

Regardless, the philosophy is either older than she gave her old man credit for or Dylan’s quietly following her lead, because he’s doing it right, only glancing at the tables as they walk through to better things.

Better things like Dylan’s force lance being snatched right off his person.

They’re two decks down when it happens, elbowing their way through a hall congested with competing food kiosk lines and competing aromas. It’s like one of those spot-the-difference holo puzzles that Rev Bem secretly loves. Before: a crowd of hungry shoppers, tables of junk, one slightly grumpy 300-year-old relic. On the other side: a crowd of hungry shoppers, tables of junk, minus one High Guard force lance, minus one mystery thief about to make a killing on the black market. Dylan makes the transition from slightly grumpy to overtly pissed off in the span it takes to realize why his tac belt is a little lighter.

“You didn't notice someone take your weapon right out of your pants?” Beka wonders. She’s already weighed the shot to Dylan’s mood against how much fun it’s going to be to tell this story later. The story came out on top.

“I did notice,” Dylan says, flat. “I’m noticing right now, I’m _continuing to notice._ Do you see them?”

Beka glances around. “I see a lot of potential thems.”

There’s probably not a single person on this metal heap who isn’t a potential suspect. She tries narrowing it down to someone who’s had a chance to take a look at what they’ve got and can’t believe their luck.

“Look for glee,” she advises, and Dylan shoots her a glare. “No I mean it,” she starts to say, and then spots it: a young woman with black and purple hair, standing in the thick of the next overcrowded gridlock. She’s looking over her shoulder at them, eyes wide. She’s thinking, _holy shit, is this a High Guard force lance?_

“There!” says Beka, and takes off after her. The woman whips back around and ducks, trying to use the crowd to obscure her escape.

Unfortunately for her, the clog is so tightly packed it literally obscures her escape and she’s left trying to push her way through an impatient, uncaring wall of bodies. When she finally breaks through they’re almost on her. She darts into a side alley and Dylan, not even bothering to dodge the miscellaneous gross that's littered everywhere, nabs the faux-fur hood on the back of her jacket and whirls her around.

“I think you have something of mine,” he says.

“What!” she squawks. “I’m not doing anything! I was just getting some lunch. Stop following me!” She’s got a Hollander’s accent, all clipped vowels and slurred _ing_ s.

“She had enough time to pass it off to someone else,” Beka says. “That’s going to take some time, if we can even find it.”

“We don’t _have_ time to spend looking. We’ve got to get to Mata Krystel.”

“Mata Krystel? Mata Krystel’s a hunk of superstitious rock and we’re nowhere close to there. That’ll be hours and hours by slipstream, Dylan. Why the hell are we going to Mata Krystel?”

“We can talk about this later.”

“You think Korres was a waste of time? Mata Krystel’s going to be more of the same.”

“They’re going to sign the Charter. They’re our next stop.”

“Okay I know this mission is your rodeo, but Mata Krystel’s seriously hopeless. There’s no point-”

“We need everyone we can get, and there’s a chance with them. You’re right, this is my rodeo. You’ve all made that very clear the last few weeks.”

“Are your shorts in a knot because of our attitudes right now?" Beka snaps, incredulous and suddenly genuinely angry. The last few weeks were well-catered hell. They could have died, and almost did. "Is this about _devotion to the cause?_ ”

“What cause?” wonders the Hollander.

“I never said it was going to be easy. In fact I explicitly said it was going to be very difficult.”

“Yeah you did say that. But Dylan, I think if we get poisoned by jerks we earn the right to complain about it. Look, we’re here, aren’t we? We signed on, we’re all still on the payroll.”

Beka notes with petty satisfaction the way his eyes narrow at the word _payroll._ She pushes on. “Would you feel better if we signed something in blood? Another few rounds of your great Charter candidates and that’s going to be what happens anyway.”

“That’s obviously not what I want,” Dylan grits out. “Re-establishing the Commonwealth is going to be dangerous, but it’s absolutely worth doing. You’ve only ever known the way things are now. The fear. This isn’t just a job, Beka. This is the most important thing any of us will ever do and none of you seem to understand that.”

“Wait, a new Commonwealth Charter? That’s what you’re doing?” says the Hollander. And then, still backed against the wall and in the grips of Dylan Hunt, prime proponent of the new Commonwealth Charter, she begins to laugh. 

Dylan’s whole face tightens: not angry, not even disappointed. Resigned. Beka’s grim sense of vindication from a minute ago drains away.

“You know,” she says, “Harper stayed when I brought home a Magog.”

Dylan hesitates, not sure where she’s going. “Rev Bem.”

“Yeah. How do you think that went, when I first wanted to bring him on board? You think Rev Bem said a proverb and Harper was like, ‘wow you sound level-headed I think I’ll disregard all my previous horrifying experiences with Magog and not at least try to shoot you in the face’?”

Dylan frowns at her and she abruptly wonders how caught up he is on the sad little Earth chapter of history. The Hollander’s gotten a handle on her cackling but it’s knocked loose her tongue. “God, you fly with Magog? I had this friend once, she said she knew a guy who was out in the Innis Drift doing some salvage and- “

“Shut up.”

“They found him eight months later and he was missing all his limbs but he was _still alive-_ ”

“I said shut it!”

“Our Magog’s a Wayist,” adds Beka.

“For now,” mutters the Hollander.

Dylan glares and the pickpocket finally shuts up. Then Dylan turns back to Beka. 

“Did he really try to shoot Rev Bem in the face?”

“Only a little.” Waved a gun around and made a lot of noise about doing it, more like, while Beka tried not to yell (and failed) and Rev Bem tried not to seem threatening (a more sincere effort, but an uphill battle). “But he didn’t.”

“Is that supposed to prove a point?” Dylan says, dubious.

“Did it work?”

“No,” Dylan says, but he sounds amused.

“My point is, Harper didn’t think it was a good idea to bring on a Magog, but he stayed because I asked him to stay. And Rev Bem stayed when my engineer threatened to kill him because I told him it would be fine, and it was. Trance and Harper and Rev Bem, and probably Tyr, too… look, Dylan, your plan here is really big and not exactly easy for us to picture right now. But you’re sure, and you can picture it, and that’s a start. Okay?”

Dylan’s frowning at her.

“She means if you don’t necessarily have faith in someone’s idea you can believe in that person instead,” says the Hollander helpfully. Dylan’s still staring at Beka.

“See, yes, the criminal gets it.”

The criminal was also looking for an opening to snap upright and elbow Dylan in the eye. Beka lunges forward, grabbing an arm with both hands, while Dylan regains his balance.

“Okay we should probably deal with her already,” says Beka.

“Yeah,” Dylan agrees. He’s probing gently at his eye socket. Beka winces in sympathy; that looked like a hard hit. “Force lance. Now.”

“I don’t have it!”

“Fine. Beka, when’s the last time Rev Bem ate?”

“Rev Bem our probably-Wayist Magog friend? Oh, not since first thing this morning. He’s probably starving by now.”

“Great. Tell him we’re bringing home dinner.”

“Okay okay okay hang on,” says the Hollander. “It’s over there.” She gestures to a little heap of garbage near the mouth of the alley. Dylan walks over and crouches down next to it. After a moment’s consideration, he fishes inside with a hand and pulls out his force lance. It’s now covered in something green.

“Was that so hard,” he says. The Hollander shakes her head. “Beka, you’ve been here before. Is there a station authority or something? Someone in charge of keeping the peace?”

“Sure, if you want to get robbed again.”

“Right.” Dylan leans in close to their pickpocket’s face. “I’m going to let you go now,” he says, voice low and dangerous. “I will not be so lenient again. If my friend or I see you again while we’re here, I will show you how we deal with thieves back in civilization.” He says _civilization_ the way you might say _the ninth circle of hell._ “And that’s a promise. Kapeesh?”

A fervent nod. Beka releases her, who takes off as soon as she’s loose. They give her a few seconds of head start, and then stroll back out of the alley together.

Dylan has a thoughtful look on his face, which Beka is coming to understand means he’s running through a scenario like an air tactics simulator, tweaking this and applying that, winding it up again and playing it out. She’s never really thought about it before, but now she wonders if this is a newly acquired habit, picked up since landing a few hundred years out of step with familiar ground, or one he’s always had.

“So we were talking,” Dylan says, eventually, “about how much you believe in me as a person.”

“Noooooo,” says Beka. “That is not what I said at all.”

“The importance of faith in your captain.”

“That doesn’t sound like me.”

“How you’re going to start firing off salutes.”

“Don’t even joke about that.”

He raises his hands in mock surrender, one still slimy and holding his force lance. 

She gives him a shove and he reaches out with an arm and smears green on the sleeve of her jacket.

“Aaughhhhh,” she says, and he laughs.


End file.
